Comment by bleachedsleet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bleachedsleet | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago, I was arrested on a hacking charge and got to see first hand the appalling nature of our legal system in criminal courts.

Normally, after your arrest, you have to have a hearing within 24-48 hours, but if they arrest you on a Friday as they did me, they are allowed to detain you for an extra day because it's the weekend. I'm sure this is a tactic used often to frighten and goad people. My hearing was exactly as the judge in this article describes. There were lots of minor, non violent offenders in the court room with me, most minorities, and many couldn't speak English well at all. The judge would openly mock them and condescend. One man obviously had no idea what he was even pleading to because his English was so poor.

Once I got to higher court for my actual sentencing, it was no different. The judge didn't even read my case and the clerk forgot to have it presented and available for the judge to review. My lawyer had to give him her own copy which he briefly skimmed without adjournment. I later discovered that the prosecuting attorney was good friends with the plaintiff and the investigating FBI officer assigned to my case.

The courts in America are a joke, the legal system is in bad need of an overhaul. I couldn't believe the level of incompetence, racism, bias and prejudice existed there.

I went to court in New Jersey in a wealthiest white suburb and what I saw seemed perfectly fine. There was a man there who, a rather sad case really, was in an accident that gave him brain damage and caused him to behave strangely. His wife had a restraining order against him and apparently he had broken into the house in the middle of the night to give his son a birthday present, then gone to sleep on the couch. It took around half an hour for the judge to patiently explain to him what was going on ascertain bail and all that jazz. He was very patient. I think the key thing about the article was that this is a courthouse in the Bronx. The way we treat the poor in this country is absolutely atrocious. We give them substandard educational facilities, poor infrastructure, treat them like garbage in the justice system, then perpetuate the myth that successful people in America deserve to be successful and that if you're poor it's because there's something wrong with you and must not have tried hard enough or been smart enough.

> or been smart enough.

So let's say this is the case. There are a lot of stupid people in this country, I might be one of them (the term is imprecise. Do behavior disorders call under that category?). What do we do about (to/for) these people? We can't find a better way towards a well functioning society than beating and jailing people?

Many of these criminals (especially drug sellers or users) are a manifestation of the cycle of poverty and mental illness while the court systems seem to make it worse instead of offering solutions for the community.

My solution is to deal with poverty as a whole, to reform the justice system, to recognize that we can give people the freedom of a basic standard of living so they do not have to live in crushing desperation. And the rest of us do not have to live as unwilling accomplices to an horrific system.

I wonder if someone could get all the court transcripts from these jurisdictions and do sentiment analysis on them and correlate against the average house prices in the courts' area.

If someone does do this, I'd be very interested in reading the outcome. Sounds like a fantastic idea. There's a few people who I've seen post on HN before that are familiar with filing FOIA requests. If the dataset can be acquired and released, I'm pretty sure there's enough people on HN who might be willing to work together in the open to write the analysis.

Count me in; if I can help I will. I live outside the US but I suspect this problem probably exists in countries all around the world.

Is there a ranking of countries by fairness of their justice system, done by a neutral party? Would be interesting to know where countries stand.

http://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index

http://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index ?

Admittedly, I didn't read the article. That said, I'm very familiar w/ the FOIA process and have a legal team setup to send them out; if the volume isn't huge then the cost isn't tremendous.

If you could provide more specific information to me on what would be beneficial/useful to FOIA, I'd be more than happy to take a look, and likely send them -- and put them up on a public Github repo with a license that makes the data useful.

Email me -- arthur [at] dantonio [dot] co [no M].

I would be willing to donate (a small amount) for these expenses. If it comes together, please put me in any mailing lists or message me directly.

Ditto.

ditto

Count me in as well. I'm freshly unemployed and looking for fun projects, preferably with a side of fighting for great good!

jonathan [dot] j [dot] mason [at] gmail

That's a really interesting suggestion.

Straight off the top, one problem is that transcripts aren't routinely generated, AFAIU. Yes, there's a court reporter taking down the proceedings, but what's generated isn't itself directly intelligible. Preparing an actual transcript from the proceedings for a small (2-day) case can run close to a thousand dollars. Doing this at scale would likely be highly expensive.

You bring to mind an alternative though: an automatic, random, appeal of a select number of cases to a review system of some sort. This might initially be a completely random sampling across all courts, but could then be subject to some sort of stratified sampling, with more cases subject to review from areas highlighted as problematic, and periodic reweighting.

What form does the "not directly intelligible" transcript take ? If it's possible to obtain that maybe there could be a way to generate an intelligible transcript automatically.

I don't know. I do know that preparing a relatively short transcript (in terms of court proceedings) can be a nontrivial request -- e.g., it's not simply pressing "generate" on some system.

That said, the records I've seen have been accurate.

It has to be processed and formatted. The reporter uses a shorthand system that needs to dealt with, and you need to be able to figure out which party is which. Also, I'm pretty sure the reporter just blasts on through, so it would be difficult to distinguish between cases without some human intervention. You probably have hundreds of people getting arraigned in one session in the Bronx.

Digital audio can be more difficult. Automated transcription sucks, and the costs for human annoyed machine transcription are very high.

Could potentially use cases for which both proceeding notes _and_ transcripts are available to train a sentiment analysis system to interpret the proceeding notes directly.

A further complication -- my understanding, this may be incorrect: court reporters are in at least some cases independent contractors. They hold rights to their transcripts. You're not actually dealing with the court in requesting them.

Your AI solution would 1) tremendously reduce consts and 2) almost certainly remove a large share of the income of these independent reporters.

Mind: the problem could be resolved by making reporters employees of the court.

Don't forget about a population density. I suspect a lot of the 'ratial' bias in the justice system stems from the number of interactions with poor people in high vs low population areas. In some areas you could sit on your back porch target practicing with a shotgun and nobody would care. That's not the case in any city.

Get drunk and drive off the road into a corn field, well if you can get out without anyone noticing then no big deal.

Several years ago(before it was against ToS) I scraped data from a county clerk website and did some mild analysis on it. I won't say what I was looking for, but I did find several correlations between case disposition (charges dropped, reduced, etc....) and certain combinations of judges/prosecutors/defense attorneys.

One particular combination showed a 10x increase in correlation with charges being significantly reduced or dropped.

It would be very interesting to see a proper dataset and analysis on this type of information.

So the solution seems simple - have the rich white suburb courts take half the cases in the Bronx.

Spread the available resources around.

I like the spirit of this, but there's a major problem with it. Sending poor people out of the city into the suburbs for rich white court can be a tremendous burden. Why not just have those judges take on some of the poor city caseload? They surely can afford the commute.

There's a massive potential problem, in either idea.

Passive aggression and resentment. The implicit loathing of a compulsory task.

The article is written by a volunteer. She finds the scenario repulsive, because there is stark contrast between her optimistic anticipation of a rewarding display of civic work ethics, and the dismal reality of thankless routine with no hope of escape and no end in sight, for anyone caught in this whirlpool of limbos pointed at hell. Neither the law, nor the victims, nor the accused may leave, all inclusive.

Taking a punitive mindset and trying to use it against the only population of participants who might have a glimmer of choice in the equation could backfire, with profoundly terrible side effects.

Use the lack of choice implicit in jury duty as a bellwether, to gauge the realistic level of enthusiasm any given non-adversarial participant carries into a court room. Not your own, but the observed ambient enthusiasm jury duty enjoys.

Like mercury concentration in seafood, that disposition likely magnifies, with ascent through the food chain.

This article is one judge's visceral reaction to a cavalcade of nightmares, on day one, going in cold. Now ask her to do it again, and again, and remain gagged, holding her tongue as she did in the article, and prevent her from acting in favour of any change. Her enthusiasm would choke and die after six months, although it would probably take longer to strangle any hope she harboured.

But the parade of misery curls around the block, and is longer than one judge's reaction or hope. It's a problem that's bigger than knee-jerk gut reactions. A direct attack on the situation might go all kinds of wrong.

An organisation of volunteers would really be a better strategy. This article highlighted one hotspot that needs volunteers to augment the workload, and the treatment of the cases. A conduit for volunteers, such as an exchange program to aid circulation, and help rotate operators of the system between duties (easy and hard), might improve results. It would need a monitor to ensure improvements are real.

Well funded volunteers.

If there's a strong link between the judge and the DA, eventually you will run into a problem with power. This is if you survive the initial onslaught of please of desperate help from desperate people (not all of whom will be paragons of virtue).

At that time, the political pressure brought to bear will be immense.

This reminds me of the recent case where the public defenders office attached the Governor to a case because of the constant budget cuts to their department.

> I went to court in New Jersey in a wealthiest white suburb and what I saw seemed perfectly fine.

Combined with some of these other accounts, that's more or less the definition of structural racism, isn't it?

No. The reason he had the experience he had was because it was a "wealthy" suburb, not because it was "white". There is a difference between correlation and causation. The root cause wasn't race, but the low volume typical of wealthy suburbs, allowing the judge to take his time. Put him in a situation where he needs to arraign a 100 people in a session and he won't be as nice anymore.

There are a number of other posters who hit the nail on the head. The problem is really with how we fund the courts. More volume needs to equate with proportional increase in resources.

Name some wealthy black suburbs before you rule out structural racism.

""" On May 31 and June 1, 1921, hundreds of whites led a racially motivated attack on the black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing some 300 people, mostly blacks. The attack, carried out on the ground and by air, destroyed more than 35 blocks of the district, then the wealthiest black community in the nation. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, some for as many as eight days. [2] The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics was 39. """ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot

"The root cause wasn't race"

That doesn't necessarily imply it isn't racist. There is such a thing as indirect discrimination. http://blog.oup.com/2015/07/indirect-discrimination-us-uk-la...:

"Indirect discrimination occurs when an apparently neutral rule or policy has a disproportionate and adverse impact on a protected group, and supposedly neutral policies become suspect unless they can be shown to be necessary for achieving legitimate goals. For example, prohibiting headgear (which would affect Sikhs), imposing a minimum height requirement (which could exclude women), or requiring a graduation degree (in a social context where a particular racial group has very few university graduates)."

In this case, one may wonder why courthouses in poorer neighborhoods aren't as well maintained as those in richer ones, and why, if the court is overloaded with cases, there aren't more judges applied to it. _If_ that's because of a rule "a courthouse per X citizens", one could argue that's indirect racism.

However, that same blog post seems to indicate that US law isn't that strong in making "disparate impact" illegal, if the impact isn't intentional.

>* I think the key thing about the article was that this is a courthouse in the Bronx. The way we treat the poor in this country is absolutely atrocious. *

Not being from the U.S. or another common-law country, I'm tempted to ask: isn't this a natural outcome of the common-law principle "by lawful judgment of his Peers"? I.e. peers in Bronx are, on the average, quite different from peers in a wealthy white suburb.

I realise someone might take this as mocking but that is not my intention. I see it as a genuine problem in common-law systems. This then exacerbates other problems of equality. (If I'm a well-to-do expatriate who comes to work in New York, would I pick a place to live in this Bronx neighbourhood? Likely not. But, in a way, anyone who does not want to be a "peer" in such an area is just as guilty of creating the situation.)

Judges, which is what the article and the two parent posts are talking about, are not peers but trained lawyers. A judge in the bronx will probably not be from the bronx.

They are professionals assigned to a court and are supposed to be impartial.

http://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/code-conduct-unite...

Also, IANAL, but "lawful judgement of his peers" sounds like it is related to trial by jury, not common law, I think you are mixing up two very distinct concepts.

EDIT: And finally, most court cases are not going to be judges making new common law decisions, but simply applying existing ones. The issue we are talking about is that in the US it is not being done fairly in criminal courts in some areas.

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